1. Introduction to Film Studies 1: Hollywood Cinema
Lecture Three:
Authorship

2. Critical Discourses: Art vs. Commerce
Commerce = Hollywood, production line, mass audience
Art cinema = Europe, individualism, select audience (subsidy)
Rudolph Arnheim: Film as Art
What is an artist? Personal vision, creativity, mastery of form, a message for the world
Critiques of the romantic notion of the artist

3. The Auteur Theory Germany 1913: The autorenfilm Auteur = Author
Les Politique des Auteurs: Cahiers du Cinema, 1950s
French ‘quality’ cinema: ‘cinema du papa’
Establishing cinema as an art form
Why the director
‘Camera-stylo’
The ‘Metteur-en-Scene’
From theory to practice: Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol
The Hollywood film artist: Welles, Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, John Ford

4. Widening the Theory America: Andrew Sarris at Village Voice
UK: Robin Wood at Movie, writing on Hitchcock and Hawks
Contemporary film criticism: Sight and Sound, broadsheet newspapers

5. Applying the Theory Consistency of style Consistency of story content
Thematic concerns
Underlying purpose

6. Critiques of the Theory
A collaborative medium
Why only directors?
How do we decide if a director is an auteur or not?
Historical context
Audiences
Structuralism (Roland Barthes): meaning is coded in the text – how do we know what the director intended?
Marxist-Feminist perspective: dominant ideology is the key factor
Postmodernism: multiple meanings

7. Restating the Theory
The Structuralist Auteur: Robin Wood – shaping the codes
Subverting dominant ideology: Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema
Postmodernism: audiences use the auteur as they wish

8. Hitchcock
Content: an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances, the ice-cold blonde, a persecuted hero on the run, the ‘McGuffin’
Style: slow tracking shots, odd angles, expressionist lighting and colour, shock cuts, black humour
Themes: psychological breakdown, ‘transference of guilt’, order vs. disorder, fear of women – misogyny
Intention? ‘To put the audience through it’.